French follies undermine EU constitution

By John Thornhill

Financial Times

Published: April 6 2005

Valéry
Giscard d'Estaing, former president of France and father of Europe's
constitutional treaty, has been around long enough to know how to
pitch a political proposition to an audience. The 79-year-old
president of the convention that drew up the constitution beguiled
600 of France's top military officers last month with his
explanation of its significance.

The introduction of a treaty governing the expanded European
Union of 25 member countries was, he told them, a "historic event"
solidifying the biggest political organisation in the world after
China and India. Caressing the pages of the treaty document, Mr
Giscard explained how the various articles of the constitution
defined the values of the EU and the rights of its citizens,
contained the rules explaining how the enlarged union would work and
codified preceding treaties.

But what, one bold officer asked, would happen if France - or any
other core country - rejected the treaty? Calmly explaining that the
constitution was a compromise forged in marathon talks among
thousands of participants, Mr Giscard said it would be impossible to
renegotiate such a document, especially as it had already been
ratified by several countries. "We would have a crisis," he
concluded.

The possibility of just such a crisis crystallising in France has
significantly increased in recent weeks, according to a batch of
opinion polls. These have all shown that a narrow majority of voters
is inclined to reject Mr Giscard's beloved constitution in a
national referendum on May 29, threatening to bring the European
project juddering to a halt.

The public anger expressed in the opinion polls has thrown
France's political elite into a panic and dismayed the country's
European partners. How could France - described recently by José
Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, as one of
Europe's "indispensable" countries - threaten to smother its own
political creation? What has gone awry with France, for decades the
intellectual inspiration and the driving force behind Europe's
integration?

When President Jacques Chirac announced on July 14 last year that
he was to hold a referendum to approve the constitution,
pro-European sentiment was strong. An electoral triumph would
reinforce Mr Chirac's political authority, giving him the perfect
platform to launch a bid for a third presidential term in 2007 if he
so desired. But events have since conspired against him. The opinion
polls show that the French electorate has grown increasingly unhappy
with his government, insecure about the country's economic future
and worried about the way the EU has been developing.

From the government's viewpoint, a terrible confluence of
embarrassments has reinforced those concerns. In February, Hervé
Gaymard, the finance minister known as a "baby Chirac" because of
his closeness to the president, was forced to resign amid a public
scandal over the state financing of his €14,000-a-month apartment.
The opening last month of a sensational trial, involving 47
politicians and business executives charged with operating a
"corruption pact" in central France in the 1990s, has also tarnished
the image of the country's political elite, which heavily favours
the constitution.

To compound the government's misery, the unemployment rate shot
above 10 per cent in January. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators
have also been demanding higher pay and protesting against the
government's plans to loosen the 35-hour maximum imposed on the
working week.

To cap it all, a furious row erupted between Paris and Brussels
over the introduction of an EU directive, originally devised by
Frits Bolkestein, the previous Dutch commissioner, to liberalise
Europe's vast market for services. The No campaigners leapt on the
threat from "Bolkestein-Frankenstein", depicting the directive as a
means by which the "ultra-liberal" Commission would open France's
markets to lower-paid workers from the new member states of eastern
Europe.

Jean-Daniel Levy, head of research at CSA, a polling
organisation, says French people used to see the EU as a means of
spreading French values and influence outside France. But they have
increasingly come to believe the reverse applies: that the EU has
become a mechanism through which outside influences and values are
imposed on France. "The Bolkestein directive was a threat to the
French identity," Mr Levy says.

The second great difficulty bedevilling the Yes campaign is that
their opponents are proving an elusive and effective enemy, refusing
to be drawn into a battle on the government's chosen ground. The Yes
camp has been vainly trying to focus the debate on the functionality
of Europe: is the EU better governed by the current Treaty of Nice
or the constitution? But the No camp has been addressing almost
every other worry in voters' minds.

Although France's two biggest political parties, the ruling
centre-right UMP and the opposition Socialist party, formally
support the constitution, each contains vocal dissidents. The
Communist party and anti-globalisation campaigners on the far left
and the "sovereigntists" and hardline nationalists of the National
Front on the far right also furiously oppose the treaty.

On the left, Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister and deputy
leader of the Socialist party, has been the most articulate critic
of the constitution. Last year, Mr Fabius tried to persuade his
fellow socialists to reject the treaty, arguing that this would
provoke a "salutary crisis" in Europe. In spite of losing an
internal party ballot on the issue by 41 per cent to 59, Mr Fabius
has continued to criticise the constitution, presenting himself as a
better European than his colleagues.

Contrary to Mr Giscard, Mr Fabius argues that France could
renegotiate a better treaty with the rest of Europe to reinforce
workers' rights and the EU's social protections. "It is because I
want a Europe of hope, a Europe of use that I want a return to the
negotiating table," Mr Fabius said on Sunday.

More extreme members of the Socialist party have been playing on
voters' economic fears. Henri Emmanuelli, a firebrand of the old
school, has been arguing that Brussels is part of the problem rather
than the solution. The Commission, under the sway of the much-feared
"Anglo-Saxon" liberals, is threatening to erode workers' protections
and accelerate the "delocalisation" of jobs to China, he says.

By contrast, the opposition right is chiefly animated by the
possible admission of Turkey into the EU. Campaigners opposed to
Turkish entry have been incensed by Mr Chirac's unilateral decision
to agree to the EU's opening membership talks with Ankara (even
though the president has promised French voters a blocking
referendum on Turkey's possible entry in 10 to 15 years' time). The
National Front, which won 18 per cent of the vote in the
presidential election in 2002, is explicitly linking the two issues,
saying that a No to the constitution would signal a rejection of
Turkey.

Some elements of the Gaullist right are also campaigning against
the constitution, arguing against both Turkey's entry and any
further loss of sovereignty to Brussels. Charles Pasqua, the
Gaullist senator and former interior minister who opposed the
Maastricht treaty of 1992 that paved the way for the euro, last
weekend pitched in for the No campaign. "Federal, ultra-liberal,
Atlanticist - such is the Europe in which we have been living since
Maastricht and such is the Europe that is being celebrated in this
constitution," he said, accusing Mr Chirac's UMP of abandoning its
Gaullist heritage.

From the perspective of the Yes camp, this opposition is a
multi-headed monster that is proving impossible to slay with one
telling argument. Moreover, its own campaign has been shambolic. The
government has found it difficult to make the case that the EU is
working in France's favour, while ministers have been locked in
battles with Mr Barroso's Commission over how to dilute the services
directive and the growth and stability pact, the fiscal rules
underpinning the euro.

Some Socialist leaders have balked at finding themselves on the
same side of the barricade as their rivals in the UMP, hampering
efforts to co-ordinate the Yes campaign. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one
of the most prominent Socialist leaders, has attacked Nicolas
Sarkozy, the populist president of the UMP, and other "fireman
pyromaniacs" on the right for speaking out against Turkey's EU entry
into the EU while campaigning for the constitution.

The Yes camp is also teeming with political sub-plots. Mr
Sarkozy's voters have been whispering to the press that a No vote
would kill off any chances of Mr Chirac's running for a third term,
leaving the field free for their man to emerge as the natural leader
of the right. Le Canard Enchainé, the investigative newspaper, has
even reported that the Elysée Palace had grown so suspicious of Mr
Sarkozy that it ordered his telephones to be bugged.

A No vote would also badly damage the reputation of François
Hollande, the Socialist party leader, clearing the way for other
presidential candidates from the left. Several political careers
could be made or broken depending on the outcome of the referendum.

All that said, there are signs that the Yes camp is finally
beginning to gain some coherence. The government has shown it is
listening to the voters' anger and has thrown some sops to the
electorate. It has increased its annual pay offer to more than 5m
civil servants and has promised to continue paying fuel subsidies to
farmers, one of the most stubborn anti-constitution groups. Michel
Barnier, the foreign minister, has also gone on the offensive in
attempting to skewer the "non-truths" of the No campaign. Denouncing
the opposition's "verbal hooliganism", he argues that there is no
direct link between the constitution and either the Bolkestein
directive or Turkey's candidacy. He maintains that a No vote would
leave France in a worse position to shape the EU's future.

Next week, Mr Chirac will make his first full intervention in the
debate, explaining to a group of young voters on live television the
importance of the constitution. The Yes supporters hope the
president's appearance could help reframe the national discussion
for the rest of the campaign. Indeed, the pollsters believe the
contest remains open, with everything hinged on the strength of the
two campaigns over the next eight weeks. "An intention to vote is
very different from a vote itself," says Mr Levy of CSA, suggesting
that the current polling trends could yet be reversed.

In his address to the Military School in Paris, Mr Giscard
concluded by paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin's grudging acceptance of
the US constitution: "I consent to this constitution because I
expect no better and because I am not sure that it is not the best."
The Yes campaigners argue that the French people may yet reach the
same verdict as Franklin, once they have been properly informed
about what the treaty does - and does not - contain.

But the debate points to a chasm between the French elite and the
people, La France d'en haut and La France d'en
bas.That distrust will surely be the dominant theme in French
politics ahead of the presidential election in 2007, whatever the
outcome of next month's referendum.

‘Oui’ camp looks frailer than in 1992

France’s Yes campaigners on Europe like to draw comfort from
their victory in the referendum in 1992, when they persuaded voters
to adopt the euro. But it would be rash to draw too much
reassurance: the result in 1992 was close and both the context and
the content of the two campaigns are very different.

Then, as now, the Yes camp started the campaign with a clear
majority. Three months before the referendum on the Maastricht
treaty, containing the rules for Europe’s single currency, the Yes
camp commanded the support of 63 per cent of voters. That support
rapidly dwindled - before the last-minute intervention of François
Mitterrand, the then president, who went on television and
outdebated Philippe Séguin, his chief critic. The Yes camp squeaked
through with 51 per cent of the vote. “In 1992, without Mitterrand,
the French would have said No to Maastricht,” says one Socialist
politician.

Sylvie Goulard, a professor at Sciences Po, Paris’s political
sciences school, argues there are three main differences between the
situation in 1992 and 2005 - all to the detriment of the current Yes
campaign.

First, the opposition to the euro was conducted mainly on a
rarefied level, with opponents of the single currency focusing on
economics. This time, the No camp is invoking populist arguments,
whether or not they are connected with the constitution. “[Laurent]
Fabius [the deputy leader of the Socialist party] has broken a taboo
by saying that you can be against this constitution and still be for
Europe. That is absolutely absurd but it is popular nonetheless,” Ms
Goulard says.

Second, Mr Chirac is not Mitterrand. Like Mitterrand in 1992, Mr
Chirac is planning a television appearance to sell his cause. But Mr
Chirac is far less of an instinctive European than his predecessor.
“You could like or dislike Mitterrand but everyone knew that he was
an acknowledged European. I am not sure that Chirac has the same
authority,” says Ms Goulard.

Third, the European context is very different. In 1992, the
Soviet Union had just imploded and democracy was flourishing in
eastern Europe. France was clearly the politically dominant force in
the EU with Jacques Delors, a French former Socialist minister, in
charge of the Commission. Mitterrand also had a close political
relationship with Helmut Kohl, then the German chancellor, jointly
setting the European agenda. Since then, France’s influence over the
expanded EU has diminished and Jacques Barrot, its commissioner, is
not regarded as greatly influential in Brussels.

Ms Goulard’s considered conclusion? “In this country, everything
is imaginable,” she says. “The French like to disobey.”